As someone who spent a lot of years observing software projects gone bad... I prefer someone with a four year degree because they have a better chance of knowing when they are in over their head. Some examples: Trying to build a mini-compiler without understanding anything about parsing, yacc, lex, etc. Trying to build a special purpose DBMS without understanding DB theory.
You should check out this reference: (Apologies, you need access to the ACM Library to read the article) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299161. Robert Glass discusses this exact issue. The article offers some references to research done using alternative approaches to inspections.
A book I enjoyed as the text for Freshman seminar when I was in college was Niven and Zuckerman (now Niven, Zuckerman, and Montgomery) "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers". This book might be a stretch for a good high school senior math student. But, it has a lot of interesting material and doesn't require any college level math as a pre-requisite. Besides, who doesn't like Number Theory.
Speaking as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics...
These problems are all incredibly difficult. A lot of very good mathematicians have thought about them, in some cases for over a hundred years. In some cases, even understanding the problem requires an advanced mathematical education. If there was anything approaching an easy solution, it would have been found already. That said...
Problems like these always require some insight. Typically, either a way to relate the problem to some other unexpected area, or some new kind of machinery that creates a leverage against the problem.
Personally, I wouldn't expect that from such an effort.
Also, SCO is a thinly traded stock with most of the stock held by insiders and institutional investors. As a result, there are not that many shares available for trading by the general public. It is easy for insiders to manipulate the stock prices and any buy or sell of 10,000 or 20,000 shares (not that many in the grand scheme of things) can cause a large swing in the price of the stock.
I have a lot of experience with software for local law enforcement agencies. This particular area is a morass of smaller and larger companies, each with their own software packages that may or may not interoperate with their competitors. I've seen a number of small police agencies that have been trapped by trying to support a package from a vendor that either (a) is out of business, or (b) is no longer supporting the package/version in question. In my judgement, a good open source package supporting local law enforcement could make major improvements to the situation.
Having said that, I don't think the existence of such a package would, in fact, put many of these vendors out of business. Most local police departments don't have the expertise to manage the installation (including data conversion!), tailoring, etc. that is required for any such package. There would still be plenty of opportunity for companies to provide this as a service.
However, the fact that the underlying package was standard, and known and understood by more than the employess of a single company would help insulate the local police from the problems that arise when their support organization moves on, for whatever reason.
In addition, there is a big drive these days for national, state, and regional, and local interoperability between law enforcement agencies. Anything that helps to standardize data models, etc. etc. would be a big help in this area.
People like to compare the software development process to manufacturing. But people also ignore the fact that before manufacturing there is design, which culminates in the first version of the object. Manufacturing produces versions 2 and beyond.
The process of developing software is more like the process of producing the ultimately detailed design. For software, manufacturing is a mechanical process -- duplicating the initial working version.
Now, with this view, ask how often the design for a product is completed on schedule, especially for a large complex product like an airplane (or the Intel Itanium processor:-)). I don't believe (I have no firm data) that the experience is a lot better than the experience for large software projects.
Any company who offers both connectivity and other services has an inherent conflict of interest. Moving ownership of the last mile to a separate company which only supplies connectivity removes this conflict of interest.
Wonderful! Can you define "free will"? If you can, I'd love to hear it. More to the point -- If you can give me a definition that is testable, I'll bet that I can figure out how to make a machine that passes the test.
If I remember right, Searle was one of the original advocates of the position that computers could never play chess. Oops. I would not choose to quote him as an authority.
More to the point, as Kurzweil points out in his book, every time someone has set up a target and said that computers can't do that (e.g. computers can't write poetry), someone has programmed a computer to do it. Clearly the trend favors the notion that one day we will have intelligent machines.
Politicians aren't scientists (at least most of them). Why should I want politicians engaged as part of a scientific debate? Answer: When there are public policy issues that need to be addressed!
So, why should I want politicians to get engaged on the topic of A.I. In spite of what Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, and Steven Speilberg may have to say, there are no public policy issues associated with A.I., at least at this time. Anything that our politicians did about this issues at this time would be, at best, meaningless.
On the other hand, look at global warming. This one's really ugly. The global warming advocates, especially the more radical of them, are arguing for massive changes in public behavior in the United States. Many of the anti-global warming advocates are sticking their heads in the sand by attempting to ignore the available evidence. This is because they don't want to have to deal with the consequences if humans really are causing massive global climate changes.
And pity our poor politicians, they can't get a simple story from the scientists, because science doesn't have one. And now they have to decide, as a matter of public policy, what is going to be done about a problem that might not even exist.
That's why global warming is getting all the attention.
Chris
P.S. I wish I could claim this for my idea, but I borrowed it from an article I read several years ago. (No reference, sorry.)
I think the added expense is worth it. I would be willing to pay $1000-$2000 (one time, please) to get high speed access to my house. Right now I am stuck with Verizon which won't provide DSL (I'm too far away), my local cable (Cox/Road Runner) which won't give me a straight answer about when I might be able to get service (except for real soon now), and my 56K modem which normally operates at 26.4K.
A good definition (I wish I could claim authorship): An art is something where the personality, creativity, etc. of the individual doing the work strongly influences the quality, usability, etc. of the end product. Otherwise, you have a craft. Painting a landscape is an art. Painting your house is a craft.
By this definition, programming, web site design, game design, etc. are clearly arts and not crafts.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who spent a lot of years observing software projects gone bad ... I prefer someone with a four year degree because they have a better chance of knowing when they are in over their head. Some examples: Trying to build a mini-compiler without understanding anything about parsing, yacc, lex, etc. Trying to build a special purpose DBMS without understanding DB theory.
You should check out this reference: (Apologies, you need access to the ACM Library to read the article) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299161. Robert Glass discusses this exact issue. The article offers some references to research done using alternative approaches to inspections.
A book I enjoyed as the text for Freshman seminar when I was in college was Niven and Zuckerman (now Niven, Zuckerman, and Montgomery) "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers". This book might be a stretch for a good high school senior math student. But, it has a lot of interesting material and doesn't require any college level math as a pre-requisite. Besides, who doesn't like Number Theory.
Speaking as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics ...
...
These problems are all incredibly difficult. A lot of very good mathematicians have thought about them, in some cases for over a hundred years. In some cases, even understanding the problem requires an advanced mathematical education. If there was anything approaching an easy solution, it would have been found already. That said
Problems like these always require some insight. Typically, either a way to relate the problem to some other unexpected area, or some new kind of machinery that creates a leverage against the problem.
Personally, I wouldn't expect that from such an effort.
Also, SCO is a thinly traded stock with most of the stock held by insiders and institutional investors. As a result, there are not that many shares available for trading by the general public. It is easy for insiders to manipulate the stock prices and any buy or sell of 10,000 or 20,000 shares (not that many in the grand scheme of things) can cause a large swing in the price of the stock.
I have a lot of experience with software for local law enforcement agencies. This particular area is a morass of smaller and larger companies, each with their own software packages that may or may not interoperate with their competitors. I've seen a number of small police agencies that have been trapped by trying to support a package from a vendor that either (a) is out of business, or (b) is no longer supporting the package/version in question. In my judgement, a good open source package supporting local law enforcement could make major improvements to the situation.
Having said that, I don't think the existence of such a package would, in fact, put many of these vendors out of business. Most local police departments don't have the expertise to manage the installation (including data conversion!), tailoring, etc. that is required for any such package. There would still be plenty of opportunity for companies to provide this as a service.
However, the fact that the underlying package was standard, and known and understood by more than the employess of a single company would help insulate the local police from the problems that arise when their support organization moves on, for whatever reason.
In addition, there is a big drive these days for national, state, and regional, and local interoperability between law enforcement agencies. Anything that helps to standardize data models, etc. etc. would be a big help in this area.
People like to compare the software development process to manufacturing. But people also ignore the fact that before manufacturing there is design, which culminates in the first version of the object. Manufacturing produces versions 2 and beyond.
The process of developing software is more like the process of producing the ultimately detailed design. For software, manufacturing is a mechanical process -- duplicating the initial working version.
Now, with this view, ask how often the design for a product is completed on schedule, especially for a large complex product like an airplane (or the Intel Itanium processor :-)). I don't believe (I have no firm data) that the experience is a lot better than the experience for large software projects.
Chris
Any company who offers both connectivity and other services has an inherent conflict of interest. Moving ownership of the last mile to a separate company which only supplies connectivity removes this conflict of interest.
Wonderful! Can you define "free will"? If you can, I'd love to hear it. More to the point -- If you can give me a definition that is testable, I'll bet that I can figure out how to make a machine that passes the test.
If I remember right, Searle was one of the original advocates of the position that computers could never play chess. Oops. I would not choose to quote him as an authority.
More to the point, as Kurzweil points out in his book, every time someone has set up a target and said that computers can't do that (e.g. computers can't write poetry), someone has programmed a computer to do it. Clearly the trend favors the notion that one day we will have intelligent machines.
Politicians aren't scientists (at least most of them). Why should I want politicians engaged as part of a scientific debate? Answer: When there are public policy issues that need to be addressed!
So, why should I want politicians to get engaged on the topic of A.I. In spite of what Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, and Steven Speilberg may have to say, there are no public policy issues associated with A.I., at least at this time. Anything that our politicians did about this issues at this time would be, at best, meaningless.
On the other hand, look at global warming. This one's really ugly. The global warming advocates, especially the more radical of them, are arguing for massive changes in public behavior in the United States. Many of the anti-global warming advocates are sticking their heads in the sand by attempting to ignore the available evidence. This is because they don't want to have to deal with the consequences if humans really are causing massive global climate changes.
And pity our poor politicians, they can't get a simple story from the scientists, because science doesn't have one. And now they have to decide, as a matter of public policy, what is going to be done about a problem that might not even exist.
That's why global warming is getting all the attention.
Chris
P.S. I wish I could claim this for my idea, but I borrowed it from an article I read several years ago. (No reference, sorry.)
I think the added expense is worth it. I would be willing to pay $1000-$2000 (one time, please) to get high speed access to my house. Right now I am stuck with Verizon which won't provide DSL (I'm too far away), my local cable (Cox/Road Runner) which won't give me a straight answer about when I might be able to get service (except for real soon now), and my 56K modem which normally operates at 26.4K.
A good definition (I wish I could claim authorship): An art is something where the personality, creativity, etc. of the individual doing the work strongly influences the quality, usability, etc. of the end product. Otherwise, you have a craft. Painting a landscape is an art. Painting your house is a craft.
By this definition, programming, web site design, game design, etc. are clearly arts and not crafts.